Too bad Oregon, along with the other 49 states, didn’t just let the markets compete to provide health insurance to its residences. What’s wrong with a robust individual heath insurance market with the ability to buy across state lines and high deductibles? But it’s not to be. Instead, as Wired magazine explains, Oregon has paid over $100 million to Oracle for its botched O’Care site. Oregon not only is stuck with Oracle to make the site work properly, but also is locked into a government contract with Larry E. Oregon’s choices are to continue paying Oracle or scrap the whole project and start anew. As Wired notes here, there’s plenty of blame to go around. Lucky taxpayers!

It’s bad enough that the state of Oregon has paid software giant Oracle over $100 million to build a healthcare exchange site that doesn’t work. But it now appears that Oregon is stuck with Oracle, unable to simply hire another firm to finish the job.

It’s the latest setback for the troubled Obamacare rollout, and it provides a classic example of an old-school IT provider lagging behind the new and more effective way of building massive web operations — the open source approach behind mega-scale websites like Google and Facebook.

Last September, as it became clear that the site wouldn’t be ready for the October 1 launch date, Oregon stopped paying Oracle. The company kept working until last week, when it pulled 100 contractors from the project, demanding $69.5 million for the work it had completed since September. This week, The Oregonian reports, the state agreed to pay $43.9 million of its outstanding bill to get Oracle back to work to finish the project.

You might think that Oregon officials would have been happy to see Oracle go, considering their $100 million site is still on the fritz. But making the service work properly will likely depend on knowledge held only by Oracle’s contractors. Oregon needs Oracle, at least for now. And that’s part of the problem: Oregon, like so many other IT customers over the years, is now locked into a contract with a vendor and has few options other than paying the company more or starting the project over from scratch.

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Pat Buchanan explains how such a tactic might work.

While China is indeed moving to claim the East and South China seas, bringing her into possible conflict with Japan over the Senkakus, the GOP is not without culpability here.

It was a Bush-led Republican Party that voted to throw open America’s markets to China. Result: In the last two years, China ran up $630 billion in trade surpluses at our expense, a figure larger than the entire U.S. defense budget for 2015.

Our trade deficits with China provide her annually with enough dollars to finance her own defense budget twice over. Twenty years of such U.S. trade deficits have given the Middle Kingdom the trillions it needed to build the armed forces to drive us out of East Asia.

Are U.S. sailors and Marines now to die defending the Senkakus against a menacing China that the Bush free traders helped mightily to create?

If Sen. Rubio wants to “stand up” to China, why not call for a 50 percent tariff on all Chinese-made goods. Try that one out on the K Street bundlers and U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Yet Marco Rubio in the primaries would be healthy for America. A showdown between non-interventionists and the neocon War Party, to determine which way America goes, is long overdue. Let’s get it on.

In my close to 20 years working with investors I have found gauging one’s risk tolerance is more art than science. There are models galore that will give you an “appropriate” allocation for your age, income needs etc. But often times that’s thrown out the window when times get tough. And tough they have gotten, for example, in the 2000 tech bust and the recent crisis in 2008. It’s amazing to me how quickly the rough times have been forgotten. In the good times, most investors feel they’re thick skinned and can handle the volatility in the market. That is until they start losing some serious money. You can forget about percentage points here and there. When a million dollar portfolio is off by $200,000, fear sets in, there’s a conversation with a spouse, and stocks are sold.

It’s with the above scenario in mind that I am writing to you today about the weekend column by the WSJ’s Jason Zweig, “The Intelligent Investor”. I usually agree with what Zweig has to say. We share the belief, for example, that one of the best books ever written on the subject of investing is Ben Graham’s, The Intelligent Investor. As I write to you my copy is within arms length. It was a gift to me by Dick Young over 15 years ago when I first joined his company so it has some meaning to me.

In his latest column, Zweig writes about a money management company that charges low fees but uses a computer algorithm to construct client portfolios. That may sound good on paper, especially during the good times. But what columnists like Mr. Zweig often fail to see is the day to day struggle of managing money while the bullets are flying overhead. It is hard. It’s emotional. And most investors realize that their risk tolerance is much, much lower than they initially thought it was. But that’s when a trusted advisor is worth his weight in gold. Because it’s the advisor that knows his client who is able to deliver when times are tough. That’s not speculation on my part. That’s how we’ve been able to win the war for our clients.

I recently spent three days with Jim Harper and other Cato scholars at Cato/Sarasota. I know Jim well. We spent time talking about Bitcoin’s future and how little most American’s know about Bitcoin. Here it is announced in the WSJ that the Bitcoin Foundation has hired Jim to advise them.

Bitcoin advocates are pumping up their efforts to reach out to governments that are scrutinizing the fledgling virtual currency closely.

The Bitcoin Foundation, a trade group, on Tuesday said it has hired Jim Harper, an official at the Cato Institute, a libertarian policy organization, to “identify political impediments to bitcoin adoption, and build confidence in bitcoin among governments around the world.”

The move comes as governments are tussling with a number of issues related to bitcoin, ranging from how it should be regulated to whether it should be taxed. Russia and China have clamped down on bitcoin in recent months, while other countries continue to assess its role and effect on their citizens and businesses.

In the U.S., the New York Department of Financial Services recently held two days of public hearings into virtual currencies as it prepares to issue a regulatory framework later this year.

The five-year old electronic currency has attracted a significant amount of attention in the past year, sending its price to more than $600 from $40 a year ago. Venture capitalists are pouring money into bitcoin-related companies and a growing number of mainstream merchants are accepting it for payment.

But the enormous growth is also causing problems that are sparking concern among regulators and law-enforcement agencies. Among them: last month’s collapse of Mt. Gox, a Tokyo-based trading exchange that last year handled the bulk of bitcoin trading. The defunct exchange has filed for bankruptcy protection in Japan and the U.S.

Global governments also have expressed concern about bitcoin being used as payment for illegal activities.

Mr. Harper, who has been director of information policy studies for the Cato Institute since 2004, also has worked as counsel to committees in the U.S. House and Senate. In addition, he was a government-relations counsel to eBay Inc.’s PayPal unit, VeriSign Inc. and other companies.

“I’m excited by the opportunity to help the foundation achieve bitcoin’s promise for improving global financial inclusion, strengthening financial privacy for law-abiding consumers, increasing liberty and dignity for people the world over, and providing a stable money supply in countries where monetary instability may threaten prosperity and even peace,” Mr. Harper said in a statement.

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The road to digital music player success is littered with failures, most famous among them is Microsoft’s Zune Player. Each one has attempted to take on Apple’s iPod (now mostly subsumed by the iPhone). But from music legend Neil Young comes a new entrant into the category of music players. The PonoPlayer offers listeners something they haven’t gotten much of with the tin-ear MP3 players they’ve come to know, good sound quality. The Pono plays hi-fidelity audio and comes with 128GB of data storage, along with an expandable memory card slot.

The Toblerone-shaped PonoPlayer, which is being built in collaboration with US hardware company Ayre Acoustics, has been designed to allow music fans to experience “studio master-quality digital music….the way the artist recorded it,” PonoMusic CEO John Hamm said in a release that surfaced over the weekend.

Neil Young first talked of Pono back in early 2012, claiming at the time that MP3s only offer listeners a measly 5 per cent of the original sound produced during the studio recording, with CDs hardly any better, offering just 15 per cent of the true sound.

“The convenience of the digital age has forced people to choose between quality and convenience, but they shouldn’t have to make that choice,” the Canadian musician said.

Late last year, Young, famous for tracks such as Heart of Gold and Helpless, wrote on Facebook: “Hearing Pono for the first time is like that first blast of daylight when you leave a movie theater on a sun-filled day.”

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Does anyone have a reasonable explanation of how Obama has the legal authority to suspend duly passed congressional tax legislation? Is there not a constitutional test of Obama’s usurpation of authority? Obama’s grand vision seems not to be hampered by the Constitution.

Could mandates not have been eliminated to help hold the price of insurance down? And should not insurance have been allowed to be purchased across state lines? Instead of allowing O’Care to become the law of the land, reforming our legal system to deter frivolous medical lawsuits would have been an easier and smarter place to start medical reform for America. The Wall Street Journal explains here. 

ObamaCare’s implementers continue to roam the battlefield and shoot their own wounded, and the latest casualty is the core of the Affordable Care Act—the individual mandate. To wit, last week the Administration quietly excused millions of people from the requirement to purchase health insurance or else pay a tax penalty.

This latest political reconstruction has received zero media notice, and the Health and Human Services Department didn’t think the details were worth discussing in a conference call, press materials or fact sheet. Instead, the mandate suspension was buried in an unrelated rule that was meant to preserve some health plans that don’t comply with ObamaCare benefit and redistribution mandates. Our sources only noticed the change this week.

That seven-page technical bulletin includes a paragraph and footnote that casually mention that a rule in a separate December 2013 bulletin would be extended for two more years, until 2016. Lo and behold, it turns out this second rule, which was supposed to last for only a year, allows Americans whose coverage was cancelled to opt out of the mandate altogether.

…

Meanwhile, a McKinsey & Company survey reports that a mere 27% of people joining the exchanges were previously uninsured through February. The survey also found that about half of people who shopped for a plan but did not enroll said premiums were too expensive, even though 80% of this group qualify for subsidies. Some substantial share of the people ObamaCare is supposed to help say it is a bad financial value. You might even call it a hardship.

HHS is also trying to pre-empt the inevitable political blowback from the nasty 2015 tax surprise of fining the uninsured for being uninsured, which could help reopen ObamaCare if voters elect a Republican Senate this November. Keeping its mandate waiver secret for now is an attempt get past November and in the meantime sign up as many people as possible for government-subsidized health care. Our sources in the insurance industry are worried the regulatory loophole sets a mandate non-enforcement precedent, and they’re probably right. The longer it is not enforced, the less likely any President will enforce it.

The larger point is that there have been so many unilateral executive waivers and delays that ObamaCare must be unrecognizable to its drafters, to the extent they ever knew what the law contained.

One of the great books on investing is not about investing in stocks. It’s about investing in baseball players. The now well-known strategy discussed in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball tells how A’s GM Billy Beane created an edge by using statistics overlooked by other managers. The league has since caught up to Beane but there may be a new way to find some value. The WSJ’s CIO Journal reports:

New technology being tested by Major League Baseball this year could provide Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane with new ways of evaluating players. The new technology relies on clusters of high performance cameras abetted by software to provide data on every action on a baseball diamond. Mr. Beane, known for pioneering the use of advanced statistics to develop a successful baseball team despite having significantly lower budgets than his competition, says he’ll use the new pool of data to help his organization evaluate players.

In the early 2000s, statistics like on-base percentage were “undervalued,” Mr. Beane says; today OBP is widely understood, to the point that the A’s cannot afford most players with high OBPs, forcing Mr. Beane to look elsewhere for an edge. “The idea that you can create a template that will work forever doesn’t happen in any business,” Mr. Beane told CIO Journal during a phone interview. “There’s some really, really bright people in this business. You can’t do the same thing the same way and be successful for a long period of time.”

The A’s have already begun tracking different types of data about player performance, and have developed proprietary algorithms used to evaluate that data. The new technology will create a new data set that Mr. Beane and his team can throw into the mix, he said. “In today’s world, and baseball included, you have access to so much data. We’ve got to use every piece of data and piece of information, and hopefully that will help us be accurate with our player evaluation. For us, that’s our life blood,” he said.

While every team will have access to this data, Mr. Beane hopes it will still provide the A’s with an advantage other teams don’t enjoy. “Ultimately what you do with it is proprietary.”